The invention concerns a method for decontaminating bulk food products and/or bulk animal feed products, in particular the raw materials for these food or animal feed products.
The contamination of food or animal feed products may be caused by various factors. Among other things, for example, the selective use of pesticides, fungicides or storage protection agents is possible. Food products and animal feed products may also be contaminated by tainted soils, molds or pest infestation.
Because of the growing world population, environmental pollution, and thus the contamination of food and animal feed products, continues to increase. For this reason legislators, manufacturers and consumers have been greatly sensitized over the last few years to the problem of contaminated food. Contamination-free cultivated areas worldwide are decreasing rapidly in spite of biocertification, and the expectations in terms of quality, price, quantity and standardized appearance of food and/or animal feed products demanded by the industry and the consumers force the producers to use more and more chemicals.
This problem is made notably worse by the global procurement and sales markets with all their differing mentalities, traditions, standards and laws. Furthermore, the means for analyzing food and/or animal feed products continue to improve, inducing legislators to gradually reduce the threshold values that these goods may not exceed. There is thus a great need for the treatment of products contaminated with bacteria, toxins, pesticides or other harmful substances exceeding the permitted thresholds so that they do not have to be discarded.
No method for decontaminating food and/or animal feed products, reducing the contaminants to the point where such food or animal feed products can be used, is known at this time. Therefore entire batches of food and/or animal feed products are disposed of if random samples exceed the permitted thresholds.
The problem that the present invention is meant to solve is therefore to design a method for decontaminating bulk food and/or bulk animal feed products of the type mentioned above in such a way that the contamination is reduced using simple tools, that the food and animal feed products do not exceed the indicated thresholds and that they thus can be processed for further productive use.